Last year, Erin and Isaac Hougland of Indianapolis got certified to become foster parents, with the hope of adopting a baby. Just a few weeks later, they got a call.

An 8-week-old baby needed a home. All they knew was that the boy's mother was a heroin addict and had left him at the hospital. They were told that because of the drugs, the baby might require some special care. But mostly, he just needed a place to go.

"Both of us were just like, 'Let's do it,' " says Isaac Hougland. "We wrapped up what we were doing at work and went to the hospital."

While millions will watch the third Republican presidential debate on TV, just 1,000 people will get tickets to see the event in person in the massive Coors Events Center on the scenic University of Colorado campus in Boulder.

CNBC, the cable network sponsoring the debate, didn't respond to questions about why the 11,000-seat arena would remain mostly empty.

Ben Carson has surged into a lead in Iowa and is climbing nationally thanks to his appeal to evangelicals. But could his own beliefs as a Seventh-day Adventist make him anathema to many of those same voters?

Donald Trump seemed to question the Republican neurosurgeon's faith over the weekend.

"I'm Presbyterian," Trump said at a Saturday rally in Florida. "Boy, that's down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don't know about. I just don't know about."

Lions are rapidly disappearing in large parts of Africa, and their population could be reduced by half outside of protected areas over the next two decades, according to a study published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

After celebrating the U.S. women's national soccer team's 2015 FIFA World Cup victory at the White House today, veteran Abby Wambach, 35, announced plans to retire.

Wambach, who is the leading international scorer for both men and women, said she will step away from the game after the team's the final four games of thier victory tour. The match against China in New Orleans on Dec. 16 will be her last match.

In a speech to a meeting of police chiefs, President Obama defended the job of police departments across the country, called for tougher gun laws and said the United States criminal justice system needs reform.

It used to be that American Muslims who wanted a halal meal had to live in a major city and know a good butcher. Want to find an eligible spouse? Get your parents involved. In the market for halal cosmetics? Good luck.

It's an obscure provision of a relatively obscure law, overseen, rather unpredictably, by the Librarian of Congress.

A section in the country's copyright law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits unlocking of "access controls" (in simpler terms, breaking digital locks to dig around computer code) on various software.

Mahendra Sharma is director of an unusual charity: It's effectively a boarding school for child brides. It's called the Veerni Institute and it provides free room, board, health care and schooling to about 70 girls from villages surrounding the northern city of Jodhpur. Child marriage is a long-standing practice in these villages, and about 30 of the students at Veerni are already married. They may be as young as 9 or 10 when they are married, but normally they aren't sent to live with their husbands until around age 15.

Poor mothers often spend way too much time hunched over a washboard. What if they could use those hours to curl up with their kids and read a book instead? A group of friends at Oxford University plans to find out by developing a combination childhood education and laundry services center, a concept they've dubbed a "Libromat."

Dennis Hof sits on a red and black velvet couch under TV screens that flash pictures of scantily clad women. Behind him, the doorbell is ringing and women in lingerie line up. Men walk in, select one of the women, sit with them at the bar and eventually head down a long hallway into bedrooms.

"We call it a meet and greet. So a customer comes up and the bell goes off and we let the girls know there's a new client in the house come out and meet him," he says, sipping on iced coffee and explaining the ways of his brothel.